


G-Man

by whichstiel



Series: Season 15 Codas [2]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Episode Tag, Episode: s15e02 Raising Hell, First Kiss, M/M, episode coda, spn 15x2
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-19
Updated: 2019-10-19
Packaged: 2020-12-24 03:28:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,452
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21092645
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whichstiel/pseuds/whichstiel
Summary: Castiel feels frozen to the spot. He should go. Dean’s been on edge - even more so around Castiel. Or should he stay? Dean’s upset; perhaps he needs Castiel. The next thought barges in like an unwelcome parade:he needs Dean. Right now, as fear tries to swallow him whole, Castiel needs Dean. He’d always been able to anchor himself in the rock of Dean’s faith, even when his own course steered too far astray. He wants to check in with that faith again.





	G-Man

At first, the tugging at Castiel’s coat is so slight that it might be the fabric pulling at a piece of furniture as he slowly paces the room. The din of the school cafeteria is constant, even at this strange early hour of the morning. Someone in the corner has a persistent cough; a handful of others possess loud, rattling snores. The rustle of sleeping bags is like a den of snakes as sleepers shift in them. A weak, overcast dawn casts everything in a quiet pallor and the floor is full of sleeping townspeople curled up with their loved ones. 

A large contingent of residents with the financial means have left by now, headed for nearby hotels and motels and confident that their stay will be compensated by a caring government. But once the ghost problem has been dealt with satisfactorily, the hunters patrolling the town’s borders will flee and leave the town with the fallout. 

There’s a stronger tug at his coat. It catches Castiel’s attention at last and he looks down at the small hand closed around the hem. There’s a wide-eyed little boy on the other end. He’s wearing striped pajamas with a cartoon picture of a train running across the front. His other arm clutches a large stuffed elephant. As Castiel turns, the boy tugs again. Castiel crouches low. 

“Are you okay?” Castiel asks quietly. The boy’s grandfather is sleeping next to him, a hand loosely curled near the boy’s pillow like he had released him only in sleep. 

“Thirsty,” the child whispers.

Castiel frowns. He glances across the cafeteria, to the smooth gray water fountains bolted to the wall. “Do you need help with the water fountain?” he asks in a low voice. He’s not sure, but the child seems like he’s old enough to handle it on his own.

The boy screws up his face into a rictus of extreme disgust. Now that Castiel’s looking, he notices that the boy’s backpack is surrounded by empty water bottles. “Ah. I’ll just, um, get you a drink.” Castiel pushes up and to his surprise, the boy scrambles out of his sleeping bag as well. “You can stay here. I’ll be right back.”

“Thanks, g-man!” the child says, loudly and with great cheer in the otherwise sleepy cafeteria. 

Castiel nods, puts out his hand like a command for the child to stay put, and heads towards the staff kitchen at the other end of the room. They’ve been storing supplies in the kitchen, which is full of industrial-sized cookware they’ll never use. None of the hunters conscripted into helping patrol the ghost-thick area know a thing about cooking for more than a few solitary mouths over a stove. In typical hunter fashion, they’ve fallen back to conducting raids of nearby supplies to feed and water the town’s residents until they can wrap up the haunting. That means that when people return to their stores, their gas stations, they’ll find perishables purloined for the cause. A few hunters hauled in every last pack of bottled water they could locate and stored it on the floor near the large freezer in the back. Castiel crosses to the water supply. There are a scant two dozen bottles left. 

“I keep telling people, use the water fountains.” The exasperated voice of Charlene, a hunter from two states over, pipes up as Castiel pulls one of the bottles from its plastic wrap.

“He didn’t want to drink from it,” Castiel explains, lifting the bottle like a shield between them. Charlene is a caustic personality, but an effective hunter. She’d be better off patrolling the border instead of guarding the little encampment in the school, but an injury from another hunt has left her the unfortunately domestic supply duty. 

Charlene doesn’t look impressed. “You know they all think the water’s poisoned? Like Flint, right? And the government ain’t gonna do shit to help them.”

“The water isn’t poisoned.”

“I know that! You think I don’t know? You try telling them that, though.” She jabs a finger towards the cafeteria, mouth drawn into a scowl. “They’re paranoid as hell.”

“Do you think they’re getting suspicious?” Castiel pictures the sleeping townspeople inside. Many of those left are elderly, with little family, or little means. People with nowhere else to go.

Charlene laughs. “Hell yeah, they’re suspicious. I’m pretty shocked that we haven’t been overrun by state police or gawkers yet. But I always say folks got an animal sense for danger, even if they won’t admit it out loud.” She taps her nose. “They know that town ain’t right. And they’re staying away.”

“Well,” Castiel says after a minute, unsure if she’s waiting for a reply. He hefts the water bottle. “I’ll just—“

“You,” she says thoughtfully. “You’re an angel. Can you do any…I dunno, tricks?”

Castiel tilts his head questioningly. His heart tries to speed up and he stops it from running an overeager race. Hunters are above all a predictable category of human; predictable in that they uniformly dislike Castiel upon first meeting due to his non-human status. That dislike, for most hunters, extends to multiple meetings after that. “Tricks?”

“You know, water to wine, loaves and fishes. We got one packet of lunch meat left. One! These people are animals, my god. I do not want to spend a full day of a hunt running supplies for a bunch of ungrateful civies.” 

Castiel blinks at her. “No,” he says at last. “I don’t— I can’t do ‘tricks’ like that. Nobody can. At least, not an angel.”

Charlene looks disappointed. “Damn. I was really hoping you could just…wave your hand and heavenly miracle us some.”

“I’m sorry to disappoint,” Castiel says, feeling that sentiment on far too many levels to properly unpack it. He turns to go, then pauses. “It wasn’t a miracle.”

“What wasn’t?” Charlene asks.

“The ‘loaves and the fishes.’ Water to wine. It wasn’t a miracle.”

For the first time, an almost friendly curiosity falls over Charlene. Castiel understands, suddenly, how she may have become a hunter. She wants to _know_ things. 

“So what happened?”

“There was a shortage of food. Of wine. Water was— In those days, it wasn’t something sought after as a drink, particularly not with a large crowd of people gathered there, animals contaminating the water source. Wine was preferred,” Castiel says, trying to trace the memory. Had he been there to witness it, or only heard about it after the fact? His mind had been scrambled so often in the past handful of years, it’s hard to say for sure.

“Lemme guess. Some rando brought the wine instead.”

“Nobody brought more. They had a very small supply. And few people nearby were willing to support the massing crowds beyond charging for lodging and food. But those few who had food and drink shared it there. They watered the wine down, until wine was more suggestion than substance. They shared the food, and all went a little hungry.”

“So…what? Nothing? No miracle? Everyone just drank watered down wine and shared the bread?”

“Oh there was a miracle by human definition,” Castiel admits. “There wasn’t enough wine to kill all the contaminants in the water. A small contingent of angels did ensure that the crowd stayed healthy.” Three of his brothers and sisters had walked among humans during those gathering days. They’d brushed shoulders and hands with their own, and passed healing from person to person, fulfilling a silent contract with God that the people didn’t even fully realize they had. 

“Hmm. I think I prefer the other story.”

Castiel shrugs. “Most people do.” He lifts the water bottle in farewell, and pushes out the door again.

The little boy still sits in his rumpled sleeping bag, the fabric bunched around him like a nest. Castiel crosses the room and hands him the water. The boy opens it with careful hands, takes a single tiny sip, then closes the bottle. He lays down again without a further word to Castiel.

Castiel retreats towards the edges of the cafeteria again. He wonders how the patrol is going. Sam had gone out with three other hunters to walk the borders and check for further weak spots. 

He thinks about the story.

Humans are good with stories, layering them over their everyday lives like coats of veneer. In the case of the Galilee gathering, people had formed a mythology around the event. One man had saved them, rather than everybody collectively banding together to look out for the comfort of others. It astonishes Castiel that the latter concept never seems to be enough for humans. As though the mere thought of their collective power is exhausting, even in success, and should be pinned on solitary figureheads instead. 

Here, he sees the townspeople who remain looking out for each other but for the most part they’re…passive. They wait. The people wait for food, for drinks, for their turn in the bathroom. They wait for their government to descend from on high, buy out their land, reimburse their losses. _G-man, _the boy had said with all the gravity of an adult, which meant he was parroting some adult in the room. 

_G-man. That’s what I was, _Castiel thinks. God’s agent with no agency of his own. A cog in the great machine of the world. But a government is just people and the same holds true for Heaven and the angelic host. They may have done the work to keep things running, but there’s no true miracle in it. Even the healing in Galilee was...

Well, that was something like a miracle, Castiel supposes. Now, they may not have even that. Not from him, at least.

Castiel balls his fingers into a fist at his side. He hopes and dreads that somebody will get hurt. Maybe Sam’s patrol party will return with an injury. Cas can heal it and the hunt will proceed with no further fuss. Or…

Or he won’t be able to heal it, just as he couldn’t heal Arthur Ketch. And the hunters will look upon him and know… Sam and Dean will look at him and know…

Dean will know he’s useless in that regard. 

Pressure builds in Castiel like water in an iron kettle. He’s a cat right now, a Schrödinger's experiment, both alive and dead. Powerful and powerless. 

The rustling of the room gets under his skin, like whispers. _Useless._

Castiel backs towards the wall, hits it, then turns to follow it out of the cafeteria and into the long, locker-lined hallway of the school. Panic buzzes under his skin, low and familiar. He just…he just needs a moment. 

The three classrooms on the opposite side of the bathrooms have been repurposed as hunter refuges. There, they clean their weapons, eat, sleep, and talk strategy. The classrooms beyond that are unused and shuttered. Castiel slips into one of the dark rooms. He rounds the corner of the inset doorway and presses against the wall there. Only then does he take a deep breath, falling back to the strategy he’d used to leave the bunker in that dark time of self-imposed fear. Castiel pushes his hand against his chest. Hand and skin and suit and tie - all real. All present. He breathes deeply again. 

Somebody sniffs. Somebody in the room.

The shades are drawn in the unused rooms so there’s little light available. _That’s no excuse,_ Castiel thinks sharply in the second between hearing the other being in the room and opening his eyes to scan it. His blade itches at his wrist. Panic still swells in his chest, shoved to the side for now but still there, like a bubble.

“Cas?” Dean’s voice emerges from the gloom. He sounds as shaky as Castiel feels.

“Dean,” Castiel says, letting his intonation fall deliberately flat and unsurprised. He thinks about the sniff he heard. “Are you alright?”

Dean laughs bitterly in response. Castiel can make him out now. He’s sitting on a stack of carpet squares, under a map of the world. “Oh yeah.” Sarcasm drips from him. “I’m great.”

Castiel feels frozen to the spot. He should go. Dean’s been on edge - even more so around Castiel. Or should he stay? Dean’s upset; perhaps he needs Castiel. The next thought barges in like an unwelcome parade: _he needs Dean_. Right now, as fear tries to swallow him whole, Castiel needs Dean. He’d always been able to anchor himself in the rock of Dean’s faith, even when his own course steered too far astray. He wants to check in with that faith again. It’s always there, just under the surface. Even when Dean was rage-black with the Mark, it was there.

But then, Castiel would have to dig for it this time, wouldn’t he? With Dean so angry, Castiel would have to pry to find that kernel of faith. _And what if,_ a nasty little voice supposed, _I can’t even do that anymore._

Castiel must have stood silently for too long because Dean shifts towards a more upright posture. His tone is sharp when he asks. “What’s going on? What’s wrong?”

“I…nothing. I just needed— Nothing’s going on. All’s quiet.“ 

Dean lets out a solitary, sarcastic chuckle. “Nothing’s wrong at all. Yeah. Nailed it right there.” He slumps again. 

Castiel recovers his mind. He isn’t wanted here and right now, he can’t deal with that. Not on top of everything else. Castiel turns to leave. He’s almost out the door, halfway illuminated by the hallway, when Dean says, “Wait.”

A moment later he says, “Cas.”

Castiel stops at the threshold and grips the doorframe. His fingers flex on it, hold it tight.

“You okay?”

Castiel looks down at the tan-flecked tile. “No,” he admits. But he won’t go over. He can’t go over. Not without—

There’s silence, almost too long, then Dean says. “You can stay. Don’t have to go right away.”

Castiel drops his hand from the doorway. “Okay,” he agrees quietly, before dropping back into the shadowed room. 

Dean’s settled his back against the wall, arms loosely resting on his upraised knees. He slaps the floor next to him, then uses the wall as leverage to lift his hips and slide out a handful of carpet pieces from his seat. He drops them with a sharp crack to the floor beside him.

Castiel takes the invitation, crosses the room, and sits on the carpet. 

They sit in silence for a while. When Dean eventually relaxes against the wall again, Castiel permits himself to do the same. He closes his eyes and breathes, willing the chemical fear in his body to dissipate. 

“I’m still pissed at you,” Dean says after a long silence. 

Castiel laughs at this, and it’s entirely unexpected to both of them. Some of Dean’s anger seems startled from him, because he looks at Castiel curiously. Castiel shrugs. “I know. I also know nothing I say is likely to help.”

Dean rolls his eyes as he grudgingly admits, “Probably right about that.”

“Probably,” Castiel agrees. And just like that, the door shut between them opens by a small wedge. 

“Is the patrol back yet?” Castiel makes a negative noise and Dean hums his understanding.

They sit and breathe together.

“So what’s up with you? Why the whole dark classroom thing?”

“I could ask you the same question.” Castiel paused. “Though I suspect I know the answer.”

“Yeah,” Dean sighs. “Same.”

Another long pause. “What I need,” Dean says at last, “is a distraction.” 

Castiel breathes. He sinks into the wall. “Me too.” Though his eyes are closed, he can feel Dean’s look. This alone is a comfort. Perhaps his failure to heal Ketch was a fluke, because he can sense the warmth of Dean’s attention like the man is shouting it into his ear. He turns his head. Opens his eyes. 

Dean is right there. Green eyes wide, lined with misery and…

Dean’s lips part and…

Time slows down for Castiel. Dean sits beside him, warm and solid and sad. But unless Castiel has misread the situation, he is leaning in for a kiss. Dean’s eyes slip shut, perhaps more out of avoidance than desire. But closing his eyes smoothes his features, like the prospect of a kiss is more than enough to calm the rabbit fear and sorrow trying to bubble over. Castiel knows the feeling, he thinks, having experienced it once with the reaper who later tried to kill him. He’d been hurting on so many levels as a new human. Kissing, physical closeness, had been solace and distraction. It had been the good kind of brainless. 

Castiel watches Dean, feeling his exhales feather on his own lips. He takes his fear and his panic and he bundles it deep, drowning it in the wild thumping anticipation of Dean’s mouth on his. 

Castiel closes the distance between them. 

The kiss is soft at first, more of a meeting of skin on skin while their breath mingles between them. Dean moves first, his lower lip tightening against Castiel’s jerkily, tentatively. Castiel forgets to breathe then and lets his mouth part further, tilting his chin to deepen the kiss. 

They part (for a moment or forever, Castiel couldn’t say). The parting is…_wrong_, and Castiel pushes into the kiss again with more fervor until there is nothing in the room but the sound of their breathing and the languid sounds of kissing. 

Though their mouths meet they still sit side by side on the carpet, as chaste as chaperoned youth at a school dance, until Dean slips a hand onto Castiel’s knee. Castiel can’t help but groan into the sensations of Dean’s fingers, so seldom gentle, brushing along the contours of his leg and he let his limbs loosen, guiding Dean’s hand inward. 

Dean seems to need little encouragement. He kisses Castiel like he’s performing a dance, practiced to perfection. His palm follows his fingers until he cups the pit of Castiel’s knee, hand hot through Castiel’s pants. At the same time, he deepens his assault on Castiel’s mouth, tongue caressing the seam of Castiel’s lips. Castiel parts them, then lifts the hand that lays on the carpet between them, and touches Dean’s waist with the tip of his fingers. 

At his touch, something breaks in Dean. A plaintive sound, half heard. Fingers wrapping around Castiel’s knee, gripping him tight. Pulling him close. 

There isn’t enough of Castiel left to panic or worry. He follows Dean’s direction with mercenary focus. He needs this. He’ll take anything. Everything. He’s given himself over already. Years ago, probably. 

Castiel pushes into Dean, opens into Dean. He slips his hand under the tangle of Dean’s shirt. Touches his skin. In turn, Dean explores him like he’s been plotting his moves for years. He teases at Castiel, tugs at his shirt, pulls at his tie, knocks clothing askew. Castiel pulls at him. It’s like moving a boulder. Dean stays rooted to the spot until he suddenly…_isn’t_. Inertia loses its grip and Dean turns and shifts until he’s straddling Castiel’s legs, pressing close. Closer.

The shout comes at some nebulous time later. Castiel almost doesn’t hear it. Dean’s sucking at his neck, Dean’s shirt is pushed up and his skin bared to Castiel’s touch. Castiel is very, very distracted. 

But Castiel is still an angel. He hears Sam calling out for his brother and closes his eyes tightly, wishing he could bottle this moment and stay in it until the end of time itself. Dean feels his tension, so attuned to him now, and pulls back with a breathless, “Cas?”

Castiel drops his hand. Licks his lips. “Your brother—“ The fear returns as he lifts his gaze to Dean. What will he see there?

What he sees is complicated: dismay, distress, longing, and yes…still a ghost of anger. Dean’s rage was delayed, not derailed. But there’s also an unfamiliar tenderness that Castiel only half-remembers, because he’s only seen it a handful of times with one or both of them battered and aching. Castiel tries to commit it to memory this time, a coal he can hold on to when things between them dip cold again. 

Dean pulls his hand from Castiel’s waistband and then he’s shoving back, preparing to rise. Distance stretches between them like cold caramel. Just when Castiel thinks it’s far enough to crack and break, and he’ll be left alone in this classroom, Dean closes the gap between them. 

It’s a light kiss that Dean leaves on Castiel’s lips before he heads out to find Sam. It’s a light kiss, but it warms Castiel. He slumps against the wall, closes his eyes, and breathes like it’s important. Like he matters.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! I'm on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/whichstiel) and [Tumblr](http://whichstiel.tumblr.com/) @ whichstiel. You may also like the Supernatural recap and gif blog I co-write/curate, [Shirtless Sammy](https://shirtlesssammy.tumblr.com/).


End file.
